Week Nine – Rebuilding Istic, Drinking Whisky, Playing Torment

I took a week off between jobs, because I needed to reset my head a bit, I needed some holiday, and I had a small pile of admin to do before the new contract started. Mostly stuff like moving my PAYE status back to my own company, sorting out indemnity insurance. I also discovered the font I was using for the company stuff is either no longer commercially usable, or I got it from someone sublicensing it without permission, so a minor rebranding effort took place.

business in the left, party in the right

The most time-consuming bit of all of this was moving my home-office around a bit to provide some separation between at-work and screwing around, which I’ve done by adding a new desk for my work laptop to go on (Actually the dining table, but that was my desk before we moved here, all things in circles). In theory, this will help me maintain concentration while I’m supposed to be working, and also not drift towards work during evenings and weekends.

A defective bottle of Caol Ila, and a less defective baby brother.

Mostly this week I’ve been fairly non-social and introspective – recharge mode tends to do that to me – but earlier in the week ccooke and ruthi came up to play games, speak of things and for us to help consume a magnum of champagne they won. All these were pleasant things, along with some samples from Drinks by the Dram, a company I should take a look at after invoices start rolling in a bit. I also picked up a small custom bottle from the Whiskey shop for a date night last week, aged by them from spirit from the Caol Ila distillery – Caol Ila being my current preferred scotch. It’s certainly young, but also very clearly peaty and full of flavours. Together with my adventures in kinetic beer this week, it’s been a fortnight of interesting alcohol.

Game-wise I’ve mostly been working my way through the last levelling content of WoW’s Legion expansion with my panda, but last week the long awaited “Spiritual Sequel” to Planescape: Torment (one of my favourite RPG games), “Torment: Tides of Numenara” finally dropped.

Erritis is very enthusiastic about ADVENTURE. This is clearly fine, and not something to be worried about.

I love the Numenara setting, and its mix of sufficiently advanced science, fantasy elements and depth make it a really good replacement for the original’s Planescape location. The thing I like best about it, though, is that it shares with the original a policy that the combat mechanic is at least equal to – and in a lot of cases subservient to – the ability to complete objectives by stealth, conversation or trickery. It’s not a game without its flaws, there’s a section I’ve recently defeated which annoyed me a lot; the companions – while deep and with interesting backstories – don’t push the envelope in the same way that – for example – Morte, Nordom or Fall-from-Grace did; and the party management while being a lot simpler than other games in its class removes some options that would have been useful. But I’m enjoying swimming in the universe and lore they’re building. Might do a more full review later on.